you?"

"A great deal. I am very fond of her."

"Then perhaps you can tell me if she is interested in this young
Culpeper?"

For a minute Corinna struggled against a burst of hysterical laughter.
Oh, if Cousin Harriet had only met him here, she thought, what a comedy
they would have made!

"Surely if any one has an opinion about that, it must be you," she
rejoined as gravely as she could.

"I haven't; not the shadow of one." He was plainly puzzled. "I thought
you might help me. You have a way of seeing things."

"Have I?" The spontaneous tribute touched her. "I wish I could see
this, but I can't. Frankly, since you ask me, I may say that I have been
troubled about it. There are things that Patty hides, even from me, and
I think I have her confidence."

"I dare say you wonder why I have come to you to-day," he said. "I can
handle most situations; but I have never had to handle the love affairs
of a girl, and I'm perfectly capable of making a mess of them. Things
like that are outside of my job."

He seemed to her a pathetic figure as he stood there, in his boyish
embarrassment and his redundant vitality, confessing an inability to
surmount the obstacle in his way. She had never known any one, man or
woman, who was so obviously lacking in subtlety of perception, in all
those delicate intuitions on which she relied more completely than on
judgment for an accurate impression of life. Was he, with his bigness,
his earnestness, his luminous candour, only an overgrown child? Even his
physical magnetism, and she felt this in the very moment when she was
trying to analyse it, even his physical magnetism might be nothing more
than the spell exercised by primitive impulse over the too complex
problems of civilization. She had heard that he was unscrupulous--vague
charges that he had never been able to repel--yet she was conscious now
of a secret wish to protect him from the consequences of his duplicity,
as she might have wished to protect an irresponsible child. Some
mysterious sense perception made her aware that beneath what appeared to
be discreditable public actions there was the simple bed-rock of
honesty. For the quality she felt in Vetch was a profound moral
integrity, an integrity which was bred by nature in the innermost fibre
of the man.

"If you will tell me--" she began, and checked herself with a sensation
of helplessness. After all, what could he tell her that she did not
know?

"I want to do what is ri